SCSI Jaz disks and HPUX

[Jerry A. Mills]

Does anyone know how to/ or if it is possible to connect an iomega jaz drive to an HPUX system. The HPUX box needs to remain isolated and stand alone due to the sensitivity of the data so a network is out. I need a compatible media to transfer both data and source code "C++" between the PC and the Unix box. We've looked at CD-RW but not all of our systems have one. But they all have a scsi connection for a jaz or jazlike drive and the jaz is external and very portable. Any help would be appreciated.

[Jason VanDerMark]

Richard,

I do not think that it is possible to connect an iomega Jaz drive to any Unix system due to the fact that there are no drivers for HP-UX to support this. A Jaz drive operates a bit differently (read proprietary) than a normal removable media scsi drive. Can you use dat tapes in your NT systems? You can pick up a DDS2/3/4 drive with NT drivers from many vendors, then it would be a simple procedure to get the info onto and off of the tapes. Hope this helps.

Good Luck,
Jason V.

[Tim Malnati]

There are a variety of issues with jaz drives which make it a poor choice. As mentioned before it has a propietary formatting technique that sort of makes it look to the system like FAT16, but it's not even close. Any attempt to format the thing with something other than an Iomega utility will at least render the jaz disk dead and will often kill the drive as well. The HPUX floppy drivers may allow you to read/write from the thing, but who knows. Another problem that jaz has is that it loves to perform scsi bus resets all the time. At a physical level it could be connected with an SE controller but I would avoid having anything else on the scsi bus, particularly a hard drive. I know there have been some things written to interface a jaz drive with Linux, so the source is available and could potentially be recompiled for HPUX.

CR-RW is available in scsi also and is probably your better bet. There are all sorts of messages relative to these drives in the mass storage forum, so there is a reasonably good chance that someone has already come up with an answer in there for this technology. There are also many utilities that have been written for Linux, so you could go through the same drill with these as well.

[Frederic Soriano]

Richard,

I read a thread on another mailling-list that was dealing with this question. Have a look at the following URL:
http://www.dutchworks.nl/htbin/hpsysadmin?h=3&dn=5979&q=Ja%7a&fh

I hope this helps !

Best regards,

Fred.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I'm sure you can get a paper punch card
quite cheaply ;)

Hey during the transfer add in a small hub/crossover cable or dial in. Then disconnect it after the transfer..
how often does it a happen?
I wonder if you can get a tape reader for
dos though? I'm sure you can.

Later,
Bill